In 1970, New Zealand racing driver Bruce McLaren dreamed up a cool little sports coupe called the M6GT. Built from the M6B Can-Am racer, the M6GT was supposed to be the company’s first road-legal sports car. Although it never came to fruition, McLaren will pay homage to the idea more than five decades later with the lovely McL 6GT – right down to the 1970s-style manual gearbox with exposed linkage. That’s right, it’s a good-old-fashioned stick shift.
Giving Bruce Due Credit
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Oddly, the McL 6GT doesn’t look anything like the company’s other supercars, with much-subdued aerodynamics and a slightly more slab-sided appearance with fewer vents and gills. The automaker’s signature crescent-shaped headlights are gone, replaced with attractive square units encased behind a sleek transparent cover, harking back to the original’s Plexiglass headlight nacelles. The car is much wider over the tires than it is on the roof, and the greenhouse exhibits a lot of tumblehome as a result – another callback to the M6GT.
Like any good modern McLaren, the McL 6GT has dihedral butterfly doors, with a much less voluptuous silhouette than its 750S and 788HS siblings that again channels the design of the 1970 prototype. The rear deck is broader, and it terminates in a cute little combination wing/spoiler that bridges above an air channel at the back. The vertical exhaust outlets are supposed to mimic the stinger-style pipes on the M6GT; ditto the pill-shaped taillights on both models.
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There are lots of novel design details on the vintage-inspired supercar. A “Speedy Kiwi” logo, first used during McLaren’s 1971 racing season, shows up on the fuel filler cap, and Bruce’s signature is etched into the engine cover. The most compelling part of the McL 6GT’s formula appears once you step inside, however.
An Unvarnished Sports Car Experience
2028 McLaren McL 6GT DebutMcLaren
In keeping with Bruce McLaren’s desire to build a simple, lightweight coupe, the modern supercar goes back to basics with an honest-to-goodness six-speed manual transmission. Unlike the mechanized, shift-by-wire sticks in the Ferrari 12Cilindri Manuale and Koenigsegg CC850, the McL 6GT doesn’t give its owner the option of automated gear changes, mandating the use of a clutch and shift lever like all sports cars used to do in decades past. And in a nod to silly auto-enthusiast fun, the gear lever itself is shaped a bit like the Speedy Kiwi, just in three dimensions instead of two.
The Mac is built atop the latest version of the automaker’s carbon fiber monocoque chassis, and although the automaker wasn’t ready to divulge powertrain or performance statistics, we presume it’ll be pretty damned fast. We wouldn’t be surprised to see it adopt the 777-horsepower, twin-turbocharged V8 of the 788HS, and although the manual will probably shift slower than the automaker’s SSG transmission, don’t expect a 0-60 time to be much slower than three seconds.
2028 McLaren McL 6GT Monterey DebutBrett T. Evans/CarBuzz/Valnet
McLaren will put the McL 6GT into production in 2028, with pricing and production numbers still shrouded in mystery. We’re also curious to see if the sports car’s design themes will spread into future company products, like the successor to the 750S and Artura.
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We could easily see the McLaren McL 6GT become an extremely limited-production car that’ll only be offered through the company’s Special Operations (MSO) division, but if not, it definitely represents a big departure from the brand’s current styling conventions. Although it has a clear connection to the founder’s dream car, the McL 6GT doesn’t really look like a modern McLaren, and as a result, it’s sure to polarize some of the automaker’s hardcore fans. As for us, we find it pretty attractive, and the manual gearbox is just some icing on the cake.
Source: McLaren
